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Protected: oh don’t be surprised

I don’t know why any of you would want to read the workings of my mind when I feel so out of sorts, but because I would feel even more shitteous if one more person e-mails me & tells me to keep blogging… here you go. (& don’t even pretend to be surprised that my self imposed blog hiatus lasted only a day. Remember this is the girl that could only detox for 48 hours.)

This is the cleaned up stream of conscious of my day. It isn’t worth reading at all and I urge you to move along and not watch my train as it begins to wreck. However some of you do seem to feel invested in all things me- butt pee and all- so I guess I shouldn’t spare you my most unflattering moments. Besides, now that so many of you know me outside of a computer monitor I suppose there is no need to keep up the charade of optimism. The following started out as an e-mail to a friend, then I realized it would have been the worst e-mail EVER. Well maybe the worst e-mail ever would be something more like, “You suck!”, but having a friend some hundred miles away e-mail you a discombobulated vomituous diatribe (is diatribe what I mean?) is pretty awful as well. So to the friend that no longer has the sole burden of having me in her in-box: you are welcome.

I will repeat that the following is dumb, lame, stupid, not worth your time and will annoy you. In the scheme of the world my problems and my bad mood are nothing. There. I’m also no longer linear. You’ve been warned. And really, you should just spare yourself.

Hey __________. Thanks for the e-mail asking how I am. Are you sure you want to know? Some people ask and all they want to hear is “fine”. I have a feeling if I said anything but the truth you would be offended. So here it goes. I am not fine. I am maybe 28 degrees below “fine”. I am in the basement with the roaches and evil furnace and fine is in the penthouse drinking a mojito.

Getting out of bed this morning was torture. If Talula had not decided to take a bath on my bladder I might have been able to position my hips in such a way that the pain of having to pee would subside enough to give me at least 30 more minutes of bed wallowing. Bed wallowing is my new morning thing. It is the only thing I do well now. I used to be able to fry an egg really well, but last weekend I started burning them. So now it is just bed wallowing. (defined as being wide awake in bed and starting to find things about yourself to hate before you even look to see what time it is)

I could smell the garlic from the toast I had for dinner last night in my pee. It might not be such a polite thing to share- that I can discern certain food odors in my piss, but you wanted sharing…Years ago I read an article in a science magazine about a woman that had urine that smelled like maple syrup. It ended up being the key to diagnosing her with some out of this world random disease. Ever since then I have been waiting for my pee to smell like maple syrup so that I could run to the emergency room and look like a genius for diagnosing myself. Only now I can no longer remember what it was the woman was sick with.

Talula decided to use her litter box while I was using mine. If I crane my neck I can see directly into her cat litter igloo. I am amazed at how creative she is with her shit. My Mother’s cats just take a crap and leave it there. Talula spends the time delicately rolling her turds until they are something like turd sushi rolled in lavender scented clumping cat litter. I am quite proud of her artistic abilities. Part of me wonders if she is keyed into my meloncholy. Maybe her cat shit arts and crafts is her way of trying to perk me up. If she really wanted to wow me she should try juggling. Just saying.

My brain feels empty this morning. Even as I run through the list of daily things I have to do, I feel no emotion. Usually there is satisfaction to completing my list. Or at the very least there is a running monologue of something. Now it is just going through the motions.

Put out GM’s pills. Clean GM’s bathroom. Start load of laundry. Put away dishes from dishwasher. Print out crossword puzzles from 3 different on-line newspapers. Feed the dog. Walk the dog. Clean up dog shit. Make coffee. Read the paper.

(but not really. I really only look at the pictures now. Yesterday there was a story about a young girl from Haiti that had a tumor on her face. It had enlarged so much that her face looked like a cartoon sort of hippopotamus. I found myself thinking, “If I had a child that looked like this one I would still be thrilled to have a child.” I began a mental list of all of the things that I would sacrifice in a child. The list included things such as missing limbs and extra genitalia. The list is actually quite long, but it feels mean to fantasize about an imaginary kid with so many things wrong with it. Right? )

I sit in the den watching CNN until I hear GM waking up. I must now harness all energy I have to present a happy and adoring face to her. I walk her to the bathroom as her balance is horrible in the morning. I wait for her to flush & then I help her off of the toilet. I supervise her as she takes her pills. Every morning she asks me what each pill is and I make up stupid things. “That pill is to make sure your toes don’t fall off.” “That pill is to keep your brown eyes brown.” When she gets to the biggest pill, the one that is the most difficult to swallow I have to say, “that is for your memory.” She then takes the pill as if her life depends on it. & it does.
I walk GM back to her room and begin to sweat. I have a personal heater in her room that keeps her thin skin warm at night. It makes being in her room, with my fatness and gut rolls, unbearable. But I have begun telling myself that I deserve this sort of uncomfortableness. That somehow i have earned this fifteen minutes of suffering. I even think that if I suffer more that THEN I will start to have good things happen to me. There is an art to martyrdom and I am mastering it.

I help GM get dressed and then stand her up. She is now able to walk on her own- at least back to the bathroom. She will spend twenty minutes in the bathroom and I am never sure what it is she does in there. I think she spends time on her hair and sometimes she comes out with a full face of make up. Mostly she just opens the draws and looks at what is inside.

I find myself thinking how lucky GM is. Sure she has been through some rough times, but she has found love. She had three children that adored her and only one of them turned out to be an asshole. She ended up with four grandchildren. Only one of them ended up a criminal. Another one would love her so much that she would take care of her when she was at her most vulnerable. I shudder at the duality of my life. That I have this love for this woman and at the same time I am so envious of the life she got to have. A life that I fear that I will never have.

We sit in the den drinking our coffee and working the crossword puzzles. She does them out-loud and sometimes I want to yell at her to shut the fuck up. She also cheats. I see her when I get up to reheat my coffee. She leans over so far that I am afraid that she will fall, but somehow she keeps her balance and is able to look at the answers on my crossword puzzle. I find this cheating endearing and sometimes, when I know that she is having a hard time with the puzzle I will purposefully get up and leave my answers angled towards her.

Lunch is always a negotiation. I try to get her to eat at least half a sandwich and a nutria-shake. (I call them chocolate milks). GM has a thing about halves. No matter what I put in front of her she will eat half. So if I want her to eat half a sandwich I have to give her a whole one. This becomes a problem when she specifically asks for a half a sandwich & I make her a whole one. She then feels that I am trying to boss her and in order to punish me she will refuse to eat anything. This happens about twice a week. An hour later I can usually get her to eat a large bowl of ice cream. It is exhausting to have so much tending to do. A part of me thinks that the meal time fights are sport for GM. It’s also a way for her to assert some control in her life.

GM asks me about “our baby Julia” about three times a day. She wonders what the baby will look like. She asks if she can hold the baby. She reminds me of stories that we must share with the baby. When she does this I feel like she is taking a chopstick and shoving it up through my girl parts and right to my heart. I regret that I ever told her about my dream. I would trade that great day with her gladly if I could get her to forget about me having a baby. I have mentioned to her that I don’t want to jinx anything and that maybe we shouldn’t talk about it. Mother has even pulled GM aside and said that she shouldn’t ask me about the baby anymore. But hey, have I mentioned that GM has Alzheimer’s? This is the lady that I had to remind of her husband’s death well over a month after we had buried him. Again I feel like it is my penance for hoping. In exchange for so foolishly believing that I ‘deserved’ a baby I am now stuck with an 85 year old woman asking me about aforementioned baby ad finitum. It is the sort of hell that is on the same parallel as living with R@in Man or a child that is always asking if we are there yet. No. We are NOT there yet and we may never get there and don’t make me pull this car over because I will.

Someone recently asked me if within this depression I ever wanted to hurt myself. I think the line of thought was that if I wanted to DO something TO myself that meant I was in a bad, bad place. (as opposed to the sort of bland blah that I am wallowing in) Here is the truth: do I want to hurt myself? No. Do I feel like I am already hurt? Yes. Would I allow myself to hurt more if I felt like I would be rewarded? Yes. Do I feel stupid for feeling like I am in quicksand? Yes. Do I think that I should get over it and stop complaining? Yes. Will I? not yet. I’ve only just begun.

I have two things in place that keep me on my hamster wheel. For starters, I know that no one can take care of GM as well as I can. It doesn’t mean that I gladly take care of her, but I am resolved to do it. I also would never leave Talula. I do have morose fantasies of what I would do if there was some freak accident where both Talula & GM were to pass away. Most of the fantasies simply involve me getting into a car and driving far, far away. Not exactly the sort of thing that is motivating.

Someone else close to me implied that GM was actually the baby that I have been praying for. Um. I suppose that is one way of looking at it. But only in a twisted Oedipus sort of way. You know, like those “My Husband is my Father” notions. I guess GM could be my child, but she isn’t. She is child-like, but I did not raise her. Sure I ‘get to’ clean her ass sometimes and I prepare her food. I keep her away from harm and I give her unconditional love. It has given me a glimpse of what motherhood might be like. But she is my Grandmother, nothing more. That is enough. GM doesn’t fit into a onesie and you can’t make her.

You know what else gets me really fucking sad? Television. Commercials specifically. I can no longer stomach watching a bunch of people sit down to a meal. I can’t deal. I also can’t stand all of the ads telling me to buy gifts for people. First off I have no money. And second off I have no desire to shop. None. The very idea of being in a mall with normal people just going about their business…I also can’t stand that I hate people now. People that are happy and celebrating and jovial. How come they get to have that feeling? What did they do to earn it? Why don’t I have any of that?

About twice a month my aunt will call me. It is always the same, generic, sort of call. She asks me what I am doing. I tell her whatever mundane thing I am in the middle of & then she exclaims, “oh fun. You must be having so much fun!” She asks how GM is doing. “Fine,” I tell her. Because this isn’t the time & place to let her know that when I tell GM that Aunt has called GM now replies, “who?” Then aunt asks me if I am getting to meet all kinds of people. Um. No. But I buck up and say something stupid like, “Oh Florida is nice.” I do this as I am aware of the contest.

If I admit that I am unhappy or that I think the move was a mistake then Uncle & his team get a point. I’m not really cheating at the game. The truth is that GM is very happy here. She feels so unburdened by not having to know where the shops are or being forced to attend D*AR meetings or church socials. She has no pressure to remember a neighbor’s name. GM is doing pretty great in that regard. As for me, well I feel like shit. Not that anybody’s asking.

Aunt e-mails me photos from her “oh it was so simple” Thanksgiving. Twenty photos of Uncle, Aunt and Cousin out at Aunt’s family farm playing football with a bazillion people in Aunt’s family. There are photos from hay rides & large tables set for dinner. There is even a kiddy table. There are photos of cousin and his cousins doing art projects and photos of pies warming in the oven. & I think, “simple”? Simple was Mother, GM’s & my thanksgiving. Simple is splitting a can of green beans 3 ways and eating macaroni and cheese. Simple is watching the Macy’s parade by your self in the den and crying at the site of Super Grover and convincing yourself that the dreariness of your mood is what deflated the balloon and made Super Grover look so sad.

My cousin is lucky. He will grow up with a table full of Aunts and Uncles, cousins his own age and a myriad of family homes to travel to for the holidays. I am envious. My family has become the crumb of a gingerbread man- what is left after all of the major limbs have been bitten off. It was such a fragile gingerbread man to begin with, only having half a body. Gone went the left arm when my Uncle K died. Gone went the head when my Grandfather died. Gone went the left leg when Uncle L became a motherfucker. Now all that is left is the middle bit. The guts. The bit that you toss to your dog.

This afternoon GM leaned over and tapped her head against my head. It was a really random gesture of affection. (I think.) She uses so much hair spray each morning that her hair was still sticky with the aqua-net. So when she butted heads with my head at the temple our hair stuck together. She found it very delightful and amusing. I immediately went to the metaphor. Here I am, stuck, and not amused. In order to free ourselves I had to decide which way to pull. If I pulled back I would pull at GM’s hair and hurt her. If I pulled forward and down I would be only pulling my hair. Only I would have the pain of hair being yanked from the root. When I pulled my head back I thought, “If I do this quickly I probably won’t feel a thing.” But then I realized that I needed to feel the yank as it might snap me out of my funk. That didn’t work. It didn’t hurt at all. It felt like hair being pulled out. & again I found myself thinking something like, “I would pull out every single hair from my head if it would get me a baby.” I would be bald, but I would be a Mother. I would wear the scarfs that my great grandmother gave me. The silk scarves with hand painted flowers and nautical designs. I would be Jackie O. Mother.

I got a brand new issue of fit pregnancy in the mail today. That’s a fun thing to get when you are depressed. It took me forever to get them to stop sending me the magazine in bama and now, for some reason, it has found its way to my florida mail box. I am being stalked by a glossy magazine with perky pregnant people posing. Pulsing pituitaries! My gut instinct was to toss the magazine into the kitchen trash. Really let it marinate and mingle with my coffee grinds, egg shells and other offensive mail (like the requests for money that GM keeps getting from a certain political party that can bite me). For whatever reason I couldn’t throw it out. I shoved the magazine behind the phone books as if I would some day come back to it. As if it was some sort of secret porn or fetish magazine. I am itchy just knowing that it is downstairs waiting to stab me with emotions all over again.

I sold my first item on eb@y. Yay me. But because I am a fucking idiot I didn’t do any research when it came to pricing the shipping. So I basically just paid some woman in Arizona to take a cookie jar off of my hands. In the state I am in it is hard to not bang my head on the steering wheel over shit like that.

Have I mentioned that I will be 31 in a few weeks? Have I mentioned that my neighborhood has already exploded in holiday cheer? Do you want to hear how my face has been broken out in this bizarre sort of acne rash for nearly a month? Did you happen to notice that it has been nearly 80 degrees in Florida?

I’m guessing it may be a while before you ask how I am again. I’m the worst version of myself at the moment. Why you read this far is beyond me.

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